The present invention relates to synthetic Oplophorus luciferases having enhanced properties compared to wild-type Oplophorus luciferase.
The deep-sea shrimp Oplophorus gracilirostris ejects a blue luminous cloud from the base of its antennae when stimulated, like various other luminescent decapod shrimps including those of the genera Heterocarpus, Systellaspis and Acanthephyra (Herring, J. Mar. Biol. Assoc. UK, 156:1029 (1976)). The mechanism underlying the luminescence of Oplophorus involves the oxidation of Oplophorus luciferin (coelenterazine) with molecular oxygen, which is catalyzed by Oplophorus luciferase as follows:

Coelenterazine, an imidazopyrazinone compound, is involved in the bioluminescence of a wide variety of organisms as a luciferin or as the functional moiety of photoproteins. For example, the luciferin of the sea pansy Renilla is coelenterazine (Inoue et al., Tetrahed. Lett., 18:2685 (1977)), and the calcium-sensitive photoprotein aequorin from the jellyfish Aequorea also contains coelenterazine as its functional moiety (Shimomura et al., Biochem., 17:994 (1978); Head et al., Nature, 405:372 (2000)).